28 March 2017

hardings' farewell.

angie and her darling crew moved west earlier this month. insert all the heartache. new york is ever the fickle mistress and so very transient, but for me and my little world, this is a tough one.

i've long known that angie desired to move west -- closer to mountains, closer to family -- and of course i had the months leading up to their farewell to consider what it all would mean, but it wasn't until we facetimed for the first time and she gave me the grand tour of her HOUSE (!!) that it really began to settle over me. i have never known new york city without angie in it, and my new york is going to look a bit different from here on out.

we have grown something bigger than friendship these past going-on-seven years; i imagine it is the closest thing i will ever know to sisterhood. she saw me through the dating years, my deep spiritual exploration, meeting my husband, planning my wedding. she stood beside me as i spoke my marriage vows. i was there for the many years she waited for a baby, the work it took to get one in her arms, that time she learned she was carrying TWO (!). i was the one she and klane called to come to that hospital on 168th street the day nora and benjamin were born. and, of course, the tiny, beautiful things scattered in between -- the shake shack dates, the aimless wanders through soho and the village, the dinners cooked at her apartment or mine, the afternoons at the museum of natural history, the sundaes split at brooklyn farmacy, the double dates at babbalucci, the walks in central park across seven autumns, the picnics under the cherry blossoms across six springs, the million hours spent talking talking talking...

perhaps my favorite memory of all didn't unfold in new york at all, but in utah one april, so many aprils ago. we flew out to visit her family and hike angels landing. we couldn't know it then, but she was just about to become a mother and i was just about to meet my husband. i look back at that sacred, particular moment we shared -- on what felt like the edge of the earth, the edge of our lives -- in such wonder.

and, utah! she lives there now, in the dreamscape of the wild west, and i am slowly but surely trading in my dreams of raising our babes together in new york city for dreams of hiking with our families amongst the canyons and the waterfalls and those red, red rocks.